Mtubatuba – With calls growing for more young people in leadership structures in municipalities growing ahead of the November 1 local government elections, the ANC in the Far North Region says it is looking to ensure that there is youthfulness and dynamism in local structures.
Thobelani Verus Ncamphalala, the party’s regional secretary in the Far North and mayor of Mtubatuba Local Municipality, who has also served as the treasurer of the ANC Youth League in KwaZulu-Natal, said that the energy and dynamism of youth was critical in leadership structures.
A case in point was made by ANC Far North regional chairperson Siphile Mdaka, who announced that in ward 36 in the Mtubatuba area they had a 27-year-old ward candidate running for councillor.
“If you look at us here, we’ve got a young mayorship. It’s not only myself, we’ve got Comrade Mbongeleni Gina, who’s also the deputy mayor. When you go to management you’ve got an MM (municipal manager) Siyabonga Ntuli who is my age, so it’s a youthful municipality with new thinking, new dynamism that we’re bringing in local government.
“Most of the municipalities are stagnant because we don’t think out of the box, we think about grants that we receive from the government. We don’t think about bringing in the private sector like the Public Private Partnerships,” Ncamphalala said.
He said that their vibrancy and out of the box thinking had seen them doing business plans to submit to the private sector which has seen them attracting funding of more than R20 million in private funding that they had initiated since they took over from the IFP last year.
“Those are the good things that we are going to do going forward,” Ncamphalala said.
Political Bureau